Some buildings transcend their mere construction to become larger-than-life symbols of their locations. Think the Empire State Building, the Sydney Opera House or the Burj Khalifa. But the Eiffel Tower stands out from the pack because of its 19th-century age—and its legacy as one of the world’s most replicated structures.
When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry. When I get dressed, I have never once considered whether to add a belt. Belts have never struck me as a thing to “add”; pants either need a belt or they don’t. But some girls like to “add” one, and that’s fine too. I do consider the area where a belt might go—that stretch of midsection where the top of my pants meets the bottom of my shirt. It means a lot (to me), where exactly on my body that convergence takes place. If it’s lower, say a few inches below my belly button, I might get slouchier when I stand around, might remember being a kid in the early aughts, and I might in general feel more weighed down by the pull of gravity. If it’s higher up on my torso, I sit up straighter in my chair, I prefer a more substantial shoe, I feel more compact, more professional, more like my mother.
Jessica Anthony's new novel, The Most, blindsided me with its power, much like the cunning tennis strategy from which it gets its title. I don't say this often, but this superb short novel, about a marriage at its breakpoint, deserves to become a classic.
Better that a book is unapologetically itself, and A Little Trickerie is lovable, fun and emotionally juicy.
Denis never bit me. He didn’t care what I looked like. He loved me for me and taught me to do the same. I became confident, funny and charismatic, just like Denis. He had a self-deprecating humour, too. He often misjudged the height of the kitchen worktop and would come tumbling down. He would style it out with a cheeky look, as if to say: “I meant to do that.” Because of him, I survived secondary school and beyond. His confidence, charm and mischievousness helped me understand that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
Bonded by physical pain, by water, by stillness, the narrator feels like she’s on a pendulum between two different selves, never certain which will prevail. The feeling is at times unsettling. “In a practical sense another’s physical pain can never be ours.” Pain is something woven tight to the self.
This is a novel of layers, starting with the name. The Echoes is the name of a place in the novel, but also reflects the echoes of life that stay with us even when we want to leave them behind. It examines the idea of an afterlife as another kind of echo that reverberates and never leaves the last place its life form inhabited. It feels starkly different from other novels that revolve around life after death in the way it examines death’s impact as well as the secrets that stay with us unbidden.
One of the book’s most beautiful qualities is its unusual mapping of interior landscapes as also ecological ones. The inner and outer are inextricably bound, she intimates; our actions shape what endures of the environment, but ecological absences shape our psyches and bodies, too.
“Have you turned me on?” Gillian Anderson asked, as she walked swiftly from her trailer on the back lot of a studio in Calgary, swishing up the hem of the long woollen skirt she was wearing to check whether a microphone transmitter affixed to a leather boot was functioning. It was mid-June, and Anderson had been based in Alberta since May, filming “The Abandons,” a lavish new Netflix drama set in Oregon in the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Her boots were scuffed and grimy; the previous day, she’d been shooting scenes on horseback, on location in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, in her role as Constance Van Ness, a flinty matriarch who has inherited, and substantially increased, the mining fortune made by her late husband. “It’s dust, dust, dust for days, and then mud, mud, mud for days,” she told me, with relish.
Anderson’s career was forged in Canada. When she was in her mid-twenties, she was cast as the F.B.I. agent Dana Scully in “The X-Files,” the sci-fi drama that débuted on Fox in 1993. “I got the job on a Thursday, and I was needed in Vancouver on the Saturday,” Anderson said. The first five seasons were shot in British Columbia, and the show’s dark, gloomy aesthetic was partly a product of the region’s meteorological conditions. “The X-Files,” which ran for nearly a decade, turned Anderson from a couch-surfing unknown into a globally recognized star, and introduced a novel kind of character to network television. Scully, brainy and acerbic, more than held her own with her fellow-agent Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny, and, in contrast with the proliferating starlet roles featured in rival nineties shows such as “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Baywatch,” Anderson’s character was notably frumpy and invariably serious. (There are Reddit threads devoted to discussing whether, during the entire run of “The X-Files,” Scully ever really smiled or laughed.) Anderson told me that, while filming a scene in an early episode, she sought to add some shading to her character by letting a tear roll down her cheek; she got a call from the show’s creator, Chris Carter, telling her that the ultra-rational Scully wouldn’t have broken down at that moment—“that she was basically a badass.”
The first thing that hits you when you press through the revolving doors of the Hyatt Regency hotel and convention centre in Rosemont, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago, is the wall of sound. A cacophony of laughter and karaoke, pumping bass and gleeful, shouting voices. The second is the odour. The air is thick with the smell of sweat, coffee, alcohol, baby powder and deodorant. But the other senses fade out when your eyes start to process what they’re seeing. Because the thing that makes entering this lobby so sensationally surreal – the kind of experience you usually have to lick rare Amazonian frogs to achieve – is what people are wearing.
This collection is a debut – it is also an ending. The poet Gboyega Odubanjo died tragically almost a year ago and the final edit of this extraordinary and arresting book has been overseen by friends, family and his publishers. It is, in one sense, a found poem – or series of poems – about something not a soul would ever wish to find. On 21 September 2001 – anyone alive at that time will remember it – the headless torso of a boy was discovered in the Thames, in the stretch near the Globe theatre, dressed in a pair of orange girls’ shorts. It was police officers who gave him the name of Adam. And although detectives went on to discover that he had been brutally dismembered in a ritual sacrifice – perhaps to win a business deal or secure good luck – the murderer was never confirmed and the case never closed.
Odubanjo’s book takes Adam as his starting point and the name itself becomes a promise, a provocation, a vehicle for his ideas.
Dead in Long Beach, California reminds the reader how lying shapes one’s intimate life and also how lying is infused throughout the noise of the greater world. At times life is messy, and it feels like “the truth is something for private moments behind one’s eyelids and not for authority figures that might call child protective services.” For Coral, lying has become a survival strategy, and in this novel it takes her everything she has to survive.
Yet again, McDermid proves to be a proficient storyteller with a deep understanding of literature, history and human nature. The novel’s refreshing focus on prevailing female friendships at its core allows it to honour its historical roots while standing firmly as an engaging and original read.
A storm in the Sahara inspired Baltimore-based Mai Sennaar’s terrific debut novel. She describes dust settling over western Europe: “A subtle amber muting to the sky… this strange sight, this strange colour, burrows so far into the subconscious minds of the people that for a few nights, they dream in gold… rare evidence that the world is one.” It’s a potent motif for our interconnectedness.
Such complex reactions run through the essays in which his moral sensibility confronts his visceral underbelly. Ultimately, he manages to control the instinctive lure of violence. He is, at heart, a civilized, loving father, husband, and son. His ability to love and care dominates, but the revelations of these essays help us understand the mentality of the many who cannot control the urge to strike out at others when hostile nearness provokes fears of threat. Does Dubus survive because he possesses the intelligence to judge his impulses, the talent to express them in words, and the depths of positive emotions that overpower the negative?
Null Island is not just a silly place to think about when cartographers are bored, it is a phenomenon that repeatedly and annoyingly asserts itself in the middle of day-to-day cartographic work, often when you least expect it. Sometimes you load a new dataset into your GIS program, but the coordinates aren’t parsed correctly and they turn into all zeroes: your data is on Null Island. Or sometimes if the map projection file for your data is wrong, you’ll find a tiny scaled-down copy of your coordinates floating around Null Island. Or even worse, maybe most of your data is showing up in the right place, but only a few of your records are missing coordinates; if you don’t think to check for it, you won’t even realize that some of your data points have “taken a trip to Null Island.”
Indeed, within the sub-field of philosophy of mathematics, mathematicians, philosophers and quantum physicists advance and argue about theories regarding the “realness” of numbers and the logical systems by which they are used in mathematics. The views on this range from “the universe is pure mathematics” to “mathematics is an internally-consistent logical construct with no relation to real things in the real world.” Much of the discussion depends on the historical development of mathematical thought and scientific understanding — but digging deeper into the question might challenge our assumptions about not only the nature of numbers, but the nature of the universe itself. Or it might inspire us to take up math.
A Better Tomorrow: Life Lessons in Hope and Strength is Mina Smallman’s account of the devastation experienced by bereaved friends and relatives after this grotesque violence. It’s also a study of the faults and faultlines of modern-day policing and crime reporting, an examination of institutional racism and misogyny, and a wrenching tribute to two daughters. Furthermore, it is an attempt to transmute “swirling confusion, horror and raw grief” into action.
In 1985, a nineteen-year-old Sinéad O’Connor moved from Dublin to London. At Heathrow, she was welcomed by the suited Special Branch officers who greeted Irish arrivals at baggage claim, routinely pulling aside suspicious-looking men. Dublin, her birthplace, couldn’t accommodate her artistic dreams or the pent-up howl she needed to shake loose. Ireland was, like her, an abused child – they had too much in common. She washed up at Portobello Road Market, jackbooted, young and hungry, with a record contract under her belt, and fell in with local Rastas. They bonded over a penchant for cursing the devilry of the Pope. Among those reed-like men debating scripture and flogging tapes on street corners, she found her people. The oppositional inclinations of Rasta chants and rebel songs would go on to shape her music and visual art. O’Connor would later dedicate ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’, a song on her second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got to Colin Roach, a young black man shot inside the foyer of Stoke Newington police station.
Every Friday from then on O’Connor tuned in to the Dread Broadcasting Corporation, a Ladbroke Grove-based pirate radio station founded by DJ Lepke, immersing herself in reggae and roots. St Marks Place, in the heart of Notting Hill, was a backdrop to these sonic convergences. At the nexus of Irish and Caribbean London, she joined the intermingling throngs of stylish, indifferent youths, fast-talking chancers, and shabby drifters in an area where former slum-dwellers scuffed up against brash yuppies. This was the London that intoxicated newcomers, where small-town dreamers could luxuriate in a newfound anonymity.
Novelist Bret Anthony Johnston was in his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, when the news came from outside Waco, about 300 miles away. A 51-day standoff between federal agents and followers of the messianic David Koresh had ended in a cataclysmic blaze. Eighty-six people, including those involved in the shootout that began the siege, were now dead. Johnston, like so many who had watched the April 1993 tragedy unfold on the news, was baffled and distraught.
“I felt like we weren’t getting the whole story,” Johnston said in a recent interview discussing his new novel inspired by the tragedy, “We Burn Daylight.” “I just felt deeply sad, and I felt a lack of trust. It’s all anybody was talking about. Half the people you met were saying they deserved it, and the other half were heartbroken and confused.”
Summers in Kansas City in the nineteen-thirties were so hot that my mother’s father moved his bed into the porch, which opened off the living room and was screened on three sides. My grandmother spent many hours there, too, mostly reading in a big wicker chair between a card table and a floor lamp. The house I grew up in also had a screened porch, which my parents added when I was eleven. That house had primitive central air-conditioning, installed by a previous owner, but running it was so expensive that my mother could seldom persuade my father to turn it on. In hot weather, the porch became our family room, dining room, playroom, and party room, and when I was in high school my girlfriend and I sometimes took my mother’s little black-and-white kitchen TV out there and turned up the volume so that we could hear “MAS*H” or “Love, American Style” above the droning of what seemed to be millions of cicadas. My own house, in Connecticut, has two porches, one screened and one not. The screened one is a great place to read on summer evenings. I once looked up from “Bleak House” and saw two black bears walking by, thirty or forty feet away. They looked less like bears than like men wearing bear suits.
During hot months in the era before air-conditioning, a porch was usually the coolest room in a house; now it’s often the hottest. I can tell from Google Earth that most of the screened porches I knew when I was a kid have been closed in, presumably so that they could be air-conditioned, too. Artificial climate control has become such a standard part of American life that to most people the loss doesn’t register as a loss, but it is one. My wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, and I finally got air-conditioning a few years ago, after surviving thirty-seven New England summers without it, but we’re determined never to enclose either of our porches. One of them has recently become our favorite place to sleep.
It’s funny how children’s media riles us. We all think we own it, that our own particular memory is the authentic one, and that any change is ruinous.
Ultimately, Simon Kuper does a great job in conveying why Paris is a city that is impossible to embrace and impossible to resist.
As you watch how the Olympics and the politics of France unfold over the coming weeks and months, keep Kuper’s book by your side. It will explain a lot.
Neurobiological models are all dopamine and serotonin and action potentials and sensory neurons — they have no language for what it feels like to be motivated by thirst or to taste a carrot. We need some way of translating between what neurobiology talks about (synapses, action potentials and so on), and conscious experience itself.
It happened the way Hemingway described bankruptcy: gradually and then suddenly. I was a young Brooklyn-based food writer cataloging differences between crusts at Saraghina and Motorino while nibbling a slice from Roberta’s—hopping nimbly onto my red steel Specialized for a second slice at Joe’s or Di Fara or Best Pizza. Then I was married, pregnant, living upstate, ignorant of the changing nature of American pizza. Such ignorance may seem trivial in your line of work. In mine, it’s fatal. Pizza is the defining food of our country, the key to the American gestalt. Unbeknownst to me, it was evolving, severing ties with tradition in some cases while fixing firmly to others, all at the hands of chefs whose names I didn’t recognize. Meanwhile, I was making baby food.
These are stories that work from the inside out. Williams has a clear preference for the point-of-view shot: she begins each of her brief, odd tales – none more than a handful of pages long – inside a new character’s head, and allows us to see only what they themselves see, in precisely the way they see it. There is no sense here, as so often in short-story collections, of universe-building. Instead, each of Williams’s stories is intensely subjective: plunging us into a new environment; offering little in the way of orientation. The experience of reading them one after the other is discombobulating, and you get the feeling that this is just the way Williams likes it.
Imagine how different our built environment might look if money and politics or engineering and cultural constraints didn’t affect what was built — where the only real limit would be the imagination of the architect. Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin’s The Atlas of Never Built Architecture is a fascinating excursion into that fantasy scenario. It is a compendium of unrealized architectural visions — buildings and other structures that were designed but never went beyond the drawing board.
All year, I had been visiting Mollie’s paintings, the ones she called the lake home series. She would put them out for me, propped up against the wall and the legs of the workbench and the door of the fridge, lined up along the hard, narrow sofa, crowding her cramped living space. I always brought the dogs with me and I would grit my teeth as they snuffled around the canvasses and wagged their tails into the partially dried paint. I would try to shoo them away, but Mollie never seemed to mind. Nothing a little linseed can’t fix, she would call out from the kitchen on the other side of the rug. The smell of scented candles, and of food, always filled the cabin – sandalwood, bergamot, fresh bread, toasted seeds, carrot soup with orange in it – and I often wondered if the paintings would look different without the attendant smells. I couldn’t believe that Mollie had no protective feelings toward her work; it seemed rather that she was open to the influence of external forces, accepting of whatever it was that luck had in store. I would be apologetic, but secretly I liked the idea that a strand of hair would adhere itself to the surface of a canvas, leaving a surreptitious signature for a conservator of the future to peel off and ask herself: who was this dog? I had a tendency to search the surfaces of artworks for flaws; I found it exhilarating to locate a drip of coffee – it seemed to me as much a piece of biography as the painting itself.
Loud, shrill and penetrating – a baby’s cry is its first act of communication. A simple adaptation that makes it less likely that the baby’s needs will be overlooked. And babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech.
Babies communicate as soon as they are born. Rigorous analyses of the developmental origins of these behaviours reveal that, contrary to popular belief – even among scientists – they are not hardwired into our brain structures or preordained by our genes. Instead, the latest research – including my own – shows that these behaviours self-organise in utero through the continuous dance between brain, body and environment.
As coffee’s precarity is rising, so is demand: According to some estimates, global consumption, currently 2.3 billion cups per day, could double by mid-century. The projected supply gap has left the industry scrambling for possible fixes, including non-arabica coffee species and caffeine-infused alternatives made from substances like chickpeas and date seeds.
For coffee purists, though, and millions of farming families like Ngibuini’s, the most promising solution might be a newfound push to improve adaptability, and yields, of arabica itself. That’s the idea behind Innovea, a new project led by the nonprofit World Coffee Research, that seeks to supercharge the breeding of improved arabica varieties — unique variations of a given species that have been selected for certain characteristics. In an industry that has long neglected to fund research and development, Innovea, a collaboration with government-affiliated research institutions in nine partner countries, including Kenya, is widely considered to be the most sweeping coffee breeding initiative in decades.
At this point in my career, I’ve written many thousands of words and edited quite a few different writers. I know a lot about procrastination. That is why, without speaking to the man or knowing him personally at all, I am nonetheless prepared to make the case that George R. R. Martin simply does not want to finish writing The Winds of Winter.
Atsuhiro Yoshida brings a secret side of Japan to life in his English-language debut Goodnight Tokyo, translated by Haydn Trowell. The hours between 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. are the prime-time setting for this series of related tales about characters who suffer from longing. Whether it is a person or a purpose, everyone is searching for a lost piece of themselves. Each character embarks upon a mini journey within the individual stories. Everyone is navigating the decisions that brought them to this point in their lives. Some characters even call it by name: fate.
In Someone Like Us, Mengestu has written a most idiosyncratic American immigrant novel, a genre that’s been available to generations and to recent arrivals from every point on the globe. All the resonant tropes are here — the crowded apartments and the random acts of nativist violence — but, by altering the reader’s vantage points, Mengestu ultimately turns the story back onto us and the control we think we have over the story of our own lives.
On an unnamed Caribbean island in the 1960s, a girl named Wheeler, the youngest of three sisters, is left in the care of her aunts while her mother goes to England to seek work. It’s a glimpse into a story not often told, of the children of the Windrush emigrants who were left behind: who waited for their parents to send for them.
Other cities have taco addictions, but in Los Angeles — with far more Mexican restaurants than any other county in the U.S. — taco culture is on perpetual overdrive. There’s a soft-shell crab taco for $26 at the clubby Arts District roof bar Cha Cha Cha and a $24 caviar taco at Nobu Los Angeles, but also $2 paper-plate tacos just outside your favorite neighborhood gay bar, and everything in between. The city has given birth to Korean tacos, Black tacos, vegan tacos, halal tacos, kosher tacos, alongside an explosion in regional tacos from the farthest corners of Mexico, making L.A. arguably the most taco-diverse city in the world.
In Los Angeles, the taco is our avatar. It is who we are. How did we get here?
In truth, hasn’t reality become a little bit more tornadic in the past two decades? Thoughts and fantasies and projections and memes—in a world without privacy, of socially externalized selves lived online and offline—are all spliced together, projected and poorly hidden. And this leaking container/curated performance called the self? Surely it has several different identities and avatars, lurking all within it.
If this sounds at all straightforward to you, chances are you will feel that Venita Blackburn has written one of the first truly realistic novels of the 21st century. Dead in Long Beach, California, her sidewinding, immensely clever debut novel, moves like life—speedily, knowingly, metafictionally, and, still, devastatingly. It’s a book about how neither drowning in stories nor the ability to spin them can protect you when they happen to you, as its protagonist, Coral, finds out in the opening pages of the novel.
And so it is with this sequel to his debut, Heart, Be at Peace. Once again, he gives us a sequence of 21 voices; readers of the first book will be reunited with many of the folk they came to know – but never fear, this works just as well as a standalone. Ryan is always deeply engaged by the way the fortunes of 21st-century Ireland impact directly on his characters: the financial emergency that afflicted this small town may have faded, but new troubles – opportunities, to some – have arisen to take their place. Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland’s history, with domestic concerns.
Dining Room
High Top
Even Higher Top
Why should I feel this way about travel? What has it ever done to me? Travel is one of those things one generally doesn’t attack in polite company, the world of letters excepted. Its wholesomeness is assumed. It broadens the mind. It makes us empathetic and, by rewarding our curiosity, encourages it to develop further. It teaches people the just-right amount of relativism —the amount that makes them easygoing in company, perhaps usefully pliable in exigencies, but not nihilistic. Only a fool or a misanthrope would criticize travel. Emerson famously did, in his essay “Self-Reliance,” but Emerson is Emerson, and any case he makes for or against anything is arguably negated by at least one of his other essays. That other essay in this case, as in every case, is “Circles,” in which he posits that any truth, as well as its opposite, are both contained on the single line that describes a circle.
Given travel’s salutary reputation, it is no wonder that I am biased against the whole topic. A writer is someone who resents being told that something is good for him, and that this is therefore why he must do it. It’s no wonder, either, if such people repeatedly fling themselves against this broad, smiling enemy, hoping to smite it.
Ghosts, gods, friendship, and love are part of each experience—whether metaphorically or metaphysically—and their interdependence makes the whole narrative feel weightier than its slim length. And yet! Those moments of philosophy are also lifted by humor, so that the experience never feels too heavy. Sky baby and the dragon reappear at just the right moments to alleviate the heaviness of sorrow, and the stories find their proper endings at last. Untold history may be melancholy, but it’s in the process of living that history can be transformed, that stories can be understood, and that justice can, at last, be found.
The story, which plays out in South Asia, Minneapolis and New York, features three generations of women whose preternatural creative talents inspire political change and incite unanticipated tragedy. To those who’d try to categorize this book, best of luck. Is it ambitious historical fiction? A precisely crafted character study? A disarming work of magical realism?
Yes.
Bitterness is never attractive. But good writing is. Liars makes an old story fresh.
In May, I came across an ad in the subway promoting the months-long residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, of Dead & Company, the current permutation of the Grateful Dead, featuring two surviving members, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, and the pop star John Mayer. The ad read, in a brassy “Star Wars” font, “Dead Forever.” I remembered what David Letterman said years ago when he saw a billboard in Times Square for the musical “Cats”: “ ‘Cats: Now and Forever’—is that a threat?”
And yet, a month later, I found myself on the way to Las Vegas, where the band was a dozen shows into thirty at that glimmering new Sno Ball of a hall just off the Strip. Half the seats on the flight seemed to be occupied by fellow-Deadheads, identifiable, as ever, by the hieroglyphs. I had checked no luggage, but I carried some personal baggage. It had been forty years, almost to the day, since I’d caught my first Grateful Dead show. The week of my flight, an elderly evangelist in a sun hat had stopped me in Central Park and asked, “Young man, what makes you happy?” I paused, then exclaimed, “Jerry Garcia!”
So one thing in common between novels and certain musical genres of the period is a palimpsest of voices and styles, a seething mass of surface particulars. But they are just that – a surface. I want to turn to a more profound theory of realism to recognise isomorphisms between the arts on a more significant level.
“I am not a biographer, in the usual definition of that term,” Ann Powers writes in her introduction to Travelling, describing herself instead as “a critic, a kind of mapmaker”. Her book follows Joni Mitchell’s trail across eight decades, mapping out not just the artist’s singular musical journey, but her misjudgments, musical and otherwise, in a discursive narrative that is peppered with critical theory and personal self-questioning.
Cloudland Revisited is worth the trip, whether you’ve passed this way before, like me, or you’re a rookie Perelman reader. He has his successors, but the full package only came around once. As he said of himself: “Before they made SJ Perelman, they broke the mould.”
Made by a white director with funding from the apartheid government yet starring an unusually diverse cast, reverent of Indigenous traditions while deeply patronizing of its Indigenous main character, The Gods Must Be Crazy delivered an idealized, false picture of South Africa into the international marketplace. It highlighted the centuries-old Khoisan culture while misrepresenting and seeming to exploit the Khoisan actor at its center. Once one of the most popular movies in South Africa’s history, it’s now seldom discussed in the country and unavailable on either of the nation’s two primary streaming networks. And in America, where theaters once played it so long they wore out the film, it might as well be invisible—if you’d like to watch it, you’ll need to buy a DVD, if you can imagine.
That’s what I did recently, to reacquaint myself with one of the movies of my childhood. Watching it for the first time in decades, I laughed, I winced, I groaned, and I wondered how this gentle, faux-naïve, fundamentally racist, sui generis comedy was even made—much less how it came to rule the global box office. The story is even weirder, and more disturbing, than I imagined.
The world’s leading cause of avoidable premature mortality, tobacco smoking is a scientifically proven, virtueless vice. Broadly speaking, a vice is a “bad habit” or a “weakness of character.” But, in the spirit of honesty, it would be a disservice to claim to be a poster girl for wellness in other ways, as I find joy in a plethora of so-called “guilty pleasures.” To steal a Natasha Lyonne (who also quit cigarettes recently) school of thought: “I fucking love a vice.” Is that always an inherently bad thing? Could some “vices” even yield a positive outcome? Context is everything.
If your engaged friend isn’t the kind of awful, selfish person who will tell you to lose weight for the sake of their “perfect” vision or leave your husband at home because he’s too short to be in her wedding photos, being a bridesmaid is great. Because really, how pleasant could these people possibly have been before their weddings if they think these requests (let’s be honest, demands) are reasonable? If your friend doesn’t suck, being her bridesmaid won’t suck either.
The true object of Butler’s sophisticated, ambivalent satire may be millennial fiction’s tendency to celebrate the liberatory potential of sincere self-narration and downplay economic advantage. The final twist is that ridiculous, chippy Kimberly, with her insufferable sincerity, may actually have a point.
Smith may be best known for her children’s book The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), but I Capture the Castle, now considered a Young Adult classic, a very English comedy, a touching romance, and, as it has been repeatedly called, a comfort read, remains her most charismatic work. Yet it has never received the critical treatment Smith hoped for. The cultural conflict that defined its reception—between “lightweight and unimportant” middlebrow writing and the highbrow literary fiction that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s—is one of the central preoccupations of the novel itself. Beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit, as well as an affecting portrait of the artist as a young girl.
Three years ago, I fell out of love with food. I didn’t want to shop, I didn’t want to cook. I ate for necessity, not pleasure. The ends of a loaf of bread. An apple. A glass of oat milk. Whatever leftovers were in the fridge.
It wasn’t just food; everything around me had transformed into shades of monochrome. I couldn’t get out of bed most days, yet I couldn’t sleep. I was wired, tired and scrolling. I didn’t care much for whether the morning turned to night.
In an act of rebellion against the numb world he finds himself in, Caveney feels deeply, observes his altered inner life so meticulously. Humour blends abruptly with the most insightful and vulnerable of reflections. Ingenious turns of phrase guide us through even the most difficult topics with the lightest touch.
The result is a story at once achingly familiar and utterly, courageously personal. A chronicle of a writer attempting to reckon with unfathomable, but one that has me chuckling to myself every couple of pages. I feel sure that I will feel the need to return to this book in future. And while it won’t claim to have all of the answers, it might just have what I need.
One of the greatest puzzles of human evolution is why we sacrifice valuable resources to help others. We know that many other species will cooperate when it’s in the interests of individuals to do so. For example, many animals defend their offspring because they carry their genes. Some birds flock together to better protect themselves from predators.
But humans go one step further. Under the right circumstances, they will endure great personal costs to advance the interests of complete strangers. And here, following the death of Cecil, was evidence that love of others could be extended across the species barrier, with thousands of members of the public all around the world clamoring to give time and money to help protect big cats living thousands of miles away. But why?
Many Parisians acknowledge the efforts; at least there are bike lanes now, sure, it’s better than nothing. But the fantasy of Paris becoming a bike-first city is still far from an ideal reality. The execution of this planned evolution could and should be better. As Esnard-Lacombe puts it, “If they treated cars and drivers this way, there would be a French revolution.”
If there is a better-smelling vegetable than a tomato grown in dirt and ripened in the sun, I don’t know it. But I know I could almost conjure up that smell just from looking at my father’s old Super 8 video home movies. I think a tomato is my first sensory memory, though I’m sure having the movie available to me as a kid helped amplify this remembrance.
In Zürich, I saw no drunken Bolsheviks at the Cafe Odeon. Down the block at the Terrasse Restaurant, there were no anarchists partying with war deserters. This wasn’t 1916.
Yet in the river, the swans were a feature still left over from more than a century earlier. They lilted on the surface of the water, seemingly unfazed by the spring rain. Present since the 1800s, the swans were glorious symbols of today’s Zürich, a global epicenter of high finance.
If we read fiction to expand our vision, to bring us into places where we would never venture, and to teach us compassion, then Anything Is Good more than accomplishes those goals.
Trade paperbacks fueled a bookstore bonanza. Two groups loved the new format: adult readers who wanted to stretch their book dollars, and the huge baby boom generation, whose seventy million members were starting to buy books and had no prejudice against paperbacks.
Arion Press is one of the world’s great printing centers. Located in San Francisco’s The Presidio, it is shrouded in chilly drifting fog from the ocean. A towering smokestack testifies to its former use as a hospital boiler plant. Inside, multi-ton letterpresses clank and whir, fires roar, melting down metal and bookbinders painstakingly fold pages upon pages upon pages. Some of the most exciting things in the rare-book universe are happening at Arion, a company with origins dating back a century and which still uses that century-old machinery.
Earlier speculations about extraterrestrial civilizations were based primarily on astronomical and technological considerations like the number of planetary systems in the galaxy and how long it might take an intelligent species to discover and begin using radio waves. That left little attention for the specific attributes of potential host planets—other than the presence or absence of water.
Stern is a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies the evolution of the continental crust, and Gerya is a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who models Earth’s internal processes. Their conclusion may disappoint extraterrestrial enthusiasts: The likelihood that other technologically sophisticated societies exist is smaller than previously thought, because basic amenities we take for granted on Earth—continents, oceans, and plate tectonics—are cosmically rare.
From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy.
Max, a thirtysomething creative writing tutor, has died, and now haunts the second-floor flat in London’s Tulse Hill where he once lived with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. This is inconvenient, as Max doesn’t believe in ghosts, and yet here he is, watching Hannah grieve, “floating about like a jellyfish, my tendrils … sweeping up the lint and hair from the floor. Sometimes when I come forth I take up the whole of a room, like a balloon slotted between ribs and blown up to make a space for breath.” Notice that funny, mysterious “come forth”, and the near-violence of the simile that follows (“slotted between ribs”): this is not going to be a quirky-sad love story, all poignant memories and hard-won insights. We are in Evie Wyld’s precise and unforgiving hands, and she knows exactly where she wants to take us.
If you’re going to write an opposites attract romance, this is exactly how you do it: by infusing the story with so much witty banter and heart-soothing tenderness that readers can’t bear to put the book down for even a second (who needs to eat or sleep anyway?). It hits all the right emotional beats, giving readers two impulsive and imperfect but down-right perfect-for-each-other characters to sympathise with and root for from the moment they appear on page to the very end of the book.
Like the commonplace books of Milton’s era, “The Garden Against Time” is a kind of anthology, a word whose Greek origins evoke the careful picking of flowers. One such “flower” is a quotation that frames the book, first in an epigraph and then repeated in the final lines, from a fourteenth-century psalter: “This boke is cald garthen closed, wel enseled, paradyse ful of all appils.” Laing borrows and adapts this image of a paper paradise stocked with fruit for the reader’s taking: her book, she hopes, is not a “garthen closed” but “a garden opened and spilling over.” That’s one way to unwall your paradise and have it, too.
John Priscu, a microbial ecologist at Montana State University, has visited Antarctica 40 times for research since the mid-1980s. When he first made the trip, scientists weren’t as worried about climate change as they are now. But these days, Priscu can feel the planet changing beneath his feet. The snow has become noticeably mushier, and driving equipment-laden tractors across the landscape feels like slogging through thick mud. Drills meant to probe icy depths instead get stuck in the slush.
For scientists like Priscu, the effects of a warming world reach far beyond our suffering planet. In Antarctica, the Arctic, and lower latitudes around the world, scientists use extreme environments to test ideas and techniques for ambitious space missions. Such places, known as analog sites, resemble environments on Mars and certain moons of Jupiter and Saturn—celestial bodies where microbial life may have once arisen, or may even be alive right now. Knowledge about the little organisms living in these strange places on Earth gets funneled into efforts to detect alien life elsewhere in the solar system.
In my twenties, I had a friend who used to show up at my doorstep uninvited with a six-pack of Red Stripe. She had a terrible job and a worse boyfriend, and whenever either was bumming her out, she’d plop down on the orange couch that my roommate had gotten from her dead great-aunt and tell us everything. In 2017, she moved to Montana, and I suppose if I had to pinpoint it, I’d say that’s when the trouble began.
One day it became undeniable that I had a friendship void in my life. I didn’t lose my friends. There was no big dustup or disaster. No romantic rivalries or fights about politics had gotten in the way. They didn’t even go missing, exactly—I knew where they were. After Red Stripe landed in Missoula, the couple whose deck we used to grill sausages on decamped to Vermont. Around the same time, L. A. started acquiring my friends at an alarming rate, and the ones who remained all seemed to have colicky babies or punishing home-renovation projects on their hands. I admitted to myself that I’d had a hand in it, too: After all, I hadn’t changed cities in fourteen years, a job in five, or a romantic partner since Obama’s first term.
Practice is an odd, absorbing little novel about an unusual subject: the act of reading and thinking deeply about literature. It works because it doesn’t try to be a bigger story than it is and because it’s concise — coming in around 200 pages, many of them only a brief paragraph long.
It also works because Brown herself is such a vivid writer.
While “The Book of Elsewhere” may include some tropes and contrivances, Miéville’s keen eye, brimful imagination and impeccable style make it a deeply pleasurable read.
While it may take time to acclimate to the language and style, the novel rewards perseverance with a compelling portrayal of characters who grow on the reader as their complexities deepen. Sullivan’s skill in evoking historical Melbourne and crafting memorable protagonists shines through, making this a worthwhile read for fans of historical fiction and atmospheric mysteries alike.
Paris ’44 tells the story of the occupation and the liberation, but it does not read like military history. There’s no danger of being lost in logistics. The book resembles some epic thriller, with vividly evoked characters all somewhere on the spectrum between collaboration and resistance, shame and glory.
And then I read Heaney, specifically his first book, Death of a Naturalist, which he’d written, it seemed obvious to me, out of the same tangle of mute, inchoate pain and free-singing elation: “The plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk, / the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.” John of Patmos gets an angel to break his brain open. My own rapture required merely a table set with sonic objects. Butter, Heaney means in that last line, though you feel the words themselves are also the subject, rendered stark and palpable and ungainsayable from the linguistic “churn” of the poem (“Churning Day”).
But pain? The poem’s about churning butter, for God’s sake. But the pain has to do with coming to consciousness, that huge first heave a young poet must make from sensation to representation, and the further and even harder heave to solder a seam between them with a singular sound. At twenty-three, I sensed, even among the bucolic subject matter, that Heaney had gone through what I was going through, and there are plenty of passages in these letters that confirm my early instinct. “It is about the artist and his relation to society,” he writes to the painter Barrie Cooke in 1985, nominally about Sophocles’ Philoctetes but transparently personal. “His right to his wound, his solitude, his resentment. Yet society’s right (?) to his gift, his bow, his commitment to the group.” Heaney is speaking of political obligations, but to make the transition I’m referring to—to translate one’s inner imperative into a form that can be shared—is, no matter how private the writer, a “commitment to the group.” The success Heaney had at negotiating this tension was a fortifying example.
The where’s and when’s of extinctions just don’t line up with global patterns of climate change, according to the data the researchers collected and analyzed, but they do correspond closely with patterns of human colonization—occurring at or after our arrival in many distinct times and places around the globe.
I’d guess that most of us who have the privilege of writing for children have heard from readers who’ve escaped into our books after conflicts with friends or parents, during cross-country moves, or in times of illness, anxiety, or grief. Books help kids persevere. And because a few of those kids and their families have shared stories like these with me, I’ve come to think of building escape pods as my most important creative duty. I want to help young readers explore big ideas, of course, and spark their love of language, and encourage them to ask heaps of questions—but more than any of that, I want to give them a literary refuge when they need it most.
The result is what may be the best novel in this fine series. The quirky characters are well drawn, the prose is tight, the pace is furious, the surprises keep coming and the violent climax is nothing less than savage.
Duffy once said: “A poem can say in so few words something so precious and startling that it almost enters us.” Mean Time entered me—the collection as a whole, but especially the title poem. Walking home late at night from rehearsals, I told the darkening sky that “The clocks slid back an hour/and stole light from my life.” After an argument with the trumpet player, I cried on the bus and whispered to myself: “I felt my heart gnaw at all our mistakes.” And when he left to work as a musician on a cruise ship for six months, I was nothing if not dramatic, writing over and over in my notebook: “These are the shortened days/and the endless nights.”
In 2002, halfway through my music degree, the local Borders bookshop began to stock Selima Hill. Up to this point, their poetry shelves included mostly canonical texts, alongside works by a few contemporary authors—Duffy, Billy Collins, and Charles Bukowski. I wasn’t part of any poetry groups, and didn’t know anyone else who even read poetry, so it was a coincidence that the cover of Portrait of My Lover as a Horse caught my eye—bright orange, with a picture of a horse standing in what looked like a rather grand living room. Most importantly, it had the word lover. I’d led a sheltered enough life for that to feel radical, thrilling—this word on the cover of a book, and a book by a woman, at that.
We’ve come a long way from the image of a tuxedoed James Bond sipping his shaken-not-stirred martini in Casino Royale. Real-life players are instead reaching for Red Bull to power through 10 straight hours of play amid the constant clinking of poker chips. On the windowless casino floor, they don sunglasses to shield any glimpse of their eyes that could give away their position to other players and wear noise-canceling headphones to silence everything but the calculations running in their heads.
They are trying to play, albeit imperfectly, a strategy computer algorithms have revealed as game theory optimal, what players call GTO: the mathematically proven way to become unexploitable to other players while maximizing winnings. How closely players can hew to GTO can often determine their success, especially since the competition has never been fiercer: Anyone can now study GTO with an app on their phone.
Each night, as the line that separates day from night sweeps across the face of the ocean, a vast wave of life rises from the ocean’s depths behind it. Made up of an astonishing diversity of animals—myriad species of minute zooplankton, jellyfish and krill, savage squid and a confusion of fish species ranging from lanternfish to viperfish and eels, as well as stranger creatures such as translucent larvaceans and snotlike salps—this world-spanning tide travels surfaceward to feed in the safety of the dark, before retreating to the depths again at dawn.
Known as the diel vertical migration, this nightly cycle is the single largest movement of life on Earth, with some estimates suggesting the biomass of the animals that make the journey may total 10 billion tons or more. So dense is this cloud of bodies, in fact, that in World War II, scientists working on early sonar were perplexed by readings showing a phantom sea floor that rose and fell at dusk and dawn. Now dubbed the deep scattering layer, this phenomenon unsettled many commanders, and later gave rise to research into the possibility submarines might be able to disguise themselves within the obscuring fog.
“There is,” Nathan writes, “very little to say of joy.… It may be that’s what’s so special about it, that it’s nondescript, even banal.” Yet, even if we may not recognize or define joy until long after it has passed, The Future Was Color reveals that our pursuit of it is never inconsequential. In fact, you might say, it is the most important journey we can undertake.
The Orange Room is a reminder that abusive relationships don’t have to involve smashed glasses or black eyes. The deliberate diminishing of a partner, the dimming of their inner light, is something so many of us have either experienced or witnessed in a friend – and Price reveals it, here, with tender care and quietly devastating accuracy.
This isn’t a ghost story, per se, but the characters dig up and deal with the ghosts of their past. It’s also much more than a typical summer beach novel. It’s sad, and hopeful, and an overall terrific read.
This second collection is timely in a different way. It is loosely themed around those thinkers whose primary focus was imagining different kinds of improvements to the politics and the societies in which they lived; they each attend, in different ways, to the question, Runciman says, of “wanting to know why we find ourselves in the situation we do and how we could achieve something better”. It would be a useful volume to place at the bedsides of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Every creature with a backbone releases endorphins in response to stress. The existence of this self-made morphine has been considered a way of identifying animals – until recently, mostly just mammals – capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. In fact, RSPCA scientists argue that having such neurotransmitters constitutes one form of evidence for sentience. We understand creatures that produce their own morphine to relieve pain are creatures capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, able to suffer and for this reason – the thinking goes – entitled to not be abused or treated in such a way as to cause unnecessary pain.
For all the ballyhoo about the total solar eclipse this past April, the event didn’t stir up much in the way of conspiracy thinking. The same cannot be said of the comet that flies across Ruby Todd’s debut novel, “Bright Objects.” Todd’s comet, named St. John, is a fictionalized version of Comet Hale-Bopp, which visited our solar system in 1997 and played a role in the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult members outside San Diego. “Bright Objects” takes place on the other side of the world, in a mining outpost turned exurb north of Todd’s current home in Melbourne, Australia.
Although some have called this book a collection of stories, it is more a gathering of prose and occasional prose poetry that does not fit into any rigid genre category. These are language pieces that access realms beyond that of most fiction.
While the ending is a little neat, The Silence in Between is a haunting and compassionate account of war’s legacy, the atrocities inflicted on ordinary German women and their extraordinary resilience.
He’s used to a certain degree of struggle when it comes to his writing. “Keep in mind that The Magicians was my first hit, and that came when I was 40,” Grossman says. “I previously had two flops. If I had then two more flops? I’ve got three kids; they’ve got to eat. I had to sort of bet on myself. But it took a lot of sidestepping before I finally did.”
One reason The Bright Sword took so long was that Grossman initially kept his day job as a journalist. “I only ever wanted to write fiction, but I was really bad at it for a long time, so I needed to support myself. Being a journalist is what I ended up doing. But it wasn’t my childhood dream,” he says. “From the outside, it looked like I had a mid-career pivot to writing novels. I was always writing novels. It was just that people didn’t want to buy them.”
But I think this story is wrong. Fixing life remains difficult – but, in terms of understanding it, the course of cell and molecular biology over the past several decades isn’t a tale of unfulfilled promise. On the contrary, we’re in one of the most exciting periods since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA’s double helix in 1953. The transformative advances of the post-genomic decades are revealing nothing less than a new biology: an extraordinary and fresh picture of how life works. And ironically, those advances turn out to undermine the skewed view of life on which the HGP itself was predicated, in which the genome sequence of DNA was (in the words Watson put into Crick’s mouth) the ‘secret of life’.
If that’s so, why haven’t we heard more about it? Why hasn’t it been trumpeted and celebrated as loudly as the HGP was? Part of the reason is that science is inherently and necessarily conservative: slow and reluctant to change its narratives and metaphors, not least because we have all (scientists and public alike) got accustomed to the old ones. And we have yet to find compelling new stories to replace them. Talk of a genetic blueprint, of selfish genes, of instruction books and digital codes gave us a narrative we could grasp. Even though we now know this to be at best a partial and at worst a misleading picture, it’s likely to remain in place until there is something better on offer.
The shōgayaki (ginger pork) was on the chewy side and the udon noodles were mushy. The ginger-and-plum mackerel could have used more soy sauce, while the onigiri (rice ball) was a tad salty. But these are minor complaints when you’re in the middle of a natural disaster.
These dishes didn’t emerge from a restaurant kitchen but from pouches and cans of saigaishoku (disaster food), emergency rations my family had kept in our home in disaster-prone Japan for years, in case an earthquake, tsunami, or some other catastrophic event trapped us for days. I decided to dig in, not out of necessity but curiosity. Could I actually survive for days on this stuff if I had to?
Living can be a heavy business. No Small Thing, the debut novel by Orlaine McDonald, concerns itself with the accretive weight of thwarted desires, familial responsibilities and the relentless, life‑dominating grind of poorly paid labour. Slim and episodic, the novel tracks a year in the life of a south London family – grandmother Livia, daughter Mickey and granddaughter Summer – as they haltingly attempt to care for one another against a background of abandonment and resentment. Also present, in the broadest sense, is Meriem, the disembodied voice of Livia’s own mother, offering gnomic wisdom and serving as a reminder that since we tend to carry our dead with us, we may as well listen to them while we are at it.
Abandoning the usual sombreness and gravity of the genre, Tan’s promising work turns to whimsy and sparkle to reckon with the fear of death, a thwarted sense of time conditioned by illness, and her double identity as both doctor and daughter.
The book simultaneously demystifies genius, by arraying all of the literal work that goes into creation, while also making it clear that there is something ineffable about being creative.
The final years of Alexander’s life have often been used by historians to impart any number of moralizing lessons often rooted in anti-Asian racism. Even in his lifetime, Alexander faced criticism that his campaign into Asia corrupted him. As he conquered further lands, the story goes, he became megalomaniacal: unnecessarily violent, easily offended and preoccupied with conquest. In this version of the narrative, Alexander’s offenses piled up to the point that some historians insisted he couldn’t have died of natural causes and must have been assassinated.
Which is why Rachel Kousser’s new biography, “Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great,” is a breath of fresh air on its subject. Kousser neatly sums up the myth of Alexander’s “trajectory from upstanding Macedonian monarch to corrupt, violent Oriental despot” and then spends a few hundred pages refuting it.
What makes the dark universe brighter—at least in certain places—is the light of the stars. But they were not present from the beginning. Once, there must have been a time when not a single star shone in the universe. Later lots of stars formed in many galaxies. And after that, old stars have gone out or exploded, and new stars have emerged. But what does this cycle look like long-term and on a cosmic average? Do the stars become fewer and fewer over time?
It turns out there is a formula that can show physicists the broad picture of star formation rate over time.
How I prepare my breakfast is very much influenced by my bicultural upbringing in the 1980s and ’90s in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California. My mom was born in 1956 to a Mexican American household and came up in the San Fernando Valley. By all accounts, her parents were very much concerned with fitting in with the Joneses, pressured to raise the all-American family and downplay their Mexican roots. From what I understand, my dad had a somewhat rural upbringing in western Washington and Hood River, Oregon, by way of Oakdale, California — about a 30-minute drive northeast of Modesto and deep in the heart of the state’s San Joaquin Valley. Just recently, as I’ve begun to unpack my family history, I learned that his birthplace goes by the moniker “Cowboy Capital of the World.” When I was little, dad told me that his family was a part of the massive wave of poverty-stricken Southwest Americans known as Okies who traversed to California for a better life.
If Caledonian Road is a throwback to the vast social canvasses that novelists used to paint on, it is simultaneously an acknowledgment of the social novel’s importance, something that O’Hagan says is increasingly getting lost in our modern era. “I worry sometimes that the novel has lost its position as the chief moral device artistically in everyday society, the little bit of art that almost everybody can afford,” he says. “We’re not looking to the novel to pose the big questions the way we have in the past. I believe that could be revived. You just need the novels.”
Twilley takes readers from an ice house in Maine to a bioarchaeology museum in London to the hills of Rwanda. This deeply reported, vividly rendered book lives up to its subtitle and aptly explains why the United Kingdom’s Royal Society called refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food.
Like existentialism, surreal, and (sorry, Alanis Morisette) ironic, the term “Orwellian” is ubiquitous and often misused. It’s typically applied to government surveillance or totalitarianism in general. This is understandable, given that British author Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, is likely best known for his novel 1984, which generations of high school students have written papers about. 1984 turns 75 this year and has been adapted into movies and a TV series and referenced in songs by the likes of David Bowie and Radiohead. Orwell indeed thought a great deal about the nature of tyranny and the uses and misuses of political power, but if he’d known what his pen name would eventually be associated with, he might have wished for a different legacy.
Brooks is able to maintain both mystery and magic, with deftly woven strands connecting the main characters’s stories, and that of the train itself. This isn’t just a story about a trip from one city to another, not just about a trip across dangerous physical territories, but a journey within: These characters must figure out who they are, what they want and what they would give up for a greater cause… and what that cause may be.
What propels the narrative isn’t so much the dramatic set pieces (though the novel isn’t short on those; several of the chapters set in the far future are genuinely jaw-dropping) but the constant flood of ideas and new ways of thinking and perceiving the world.
Ten fathoms deep below the Gulf of Mexico, and several miles off the coast of Alabama, lies a submerged cypress forest sprouting with sea anemones. More than 60,000 years old, the cypress trees – some of them 6ft in diameter – were buried in sediments for millennia before they were exposed in 2004 when waves driven by Hurricane Ivan scoured the sea floor.
“Although the trees were dead, they were still standing in place,” writes Daniel Lewis in his global arboreal odyssey, Twelve Trees. Cypress samples brought to the surface could offer clues to the effects of climate on wood from that long-ago era, he explains. But soon after the discovery of the watery forest, salvage companies sought permits to dig up the ancient logs and turn them into furniture.
People just don't read here. Now that I’ve had my own experience in France, those words haunt me. What is the role of the author as a public intellectual in a country where so many people don't read? The truth is, I have no clue… but I'm sure the answer is somewhere out there, and probably the only way to find it is to read a lot.
“I don’t think we have enough hot dogs,” Julianne Moore’s character whispers gloomily in Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May December. The scene that quickly became iconic online for how amusingly melodramatic it is also captures, perhaps inadvertently, America’s strange relationship with the oblong food. Is there such a thing as having enough hot dogs? As a culture, the answer seems to be no. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council estimates that we eat somewhere in the region of 20 billion hot dogs every year, or about 70 per person. (Hot dog eating contest champion Joey Chestnut once downed a record 76 in 10 minutes.)
The hot dog’s popularity isn’t exactly surprising. It’s an undemanding food, coming to you precooked and ready to eat. It’s so easy to make that a child could do it, and indeed many of us did as kids. During the Covid lockdown, when other people had their hot girl walks, I entered my hot dog era, eating nothing else for a week straight in the stifling kitchen of my apartment. It turned out that I wasn’t alone: In March 2020, hot dog sales were already up by 127 percent for the year.
Time was that drinking a Bloody Mary was the closest you’d get to feeling like your cocktail was a meal. But ever since PDT put bacon-washed bourbon in an Old-Fashioned in 2007, cocktails have found inspiration from the dinner plate. While the Benton’s Old-Fashioned still reads like an Old-Fashioned, today’s food-inspired cocktails invert the formula from a cocktail with food flavors, to food in liquid form. In other words, it’s no longer about infusing a bacon flavor into a cocktail, but making a cocktail that tastes exactly like bacon. These food cocktails are everywhere, and they’re starting to get a little weird.
Laura van den Berg's State of Paradise is a wonderful, enigmatic novel that effortlessly blends the commonplace and the extraordinary. A true-to-life narrative about a woman learning to navigate the world after a strange pandemic, dealing with her work as a ghostwriter, and experiencing a devastating storm in her native Florida, this novel is also a surreal exploration of memory and the lingering effects of trauma seasoned with elements of mystery as well as science fiction.
In this way, Williams affirms her well earned status as one of our most celebrated, living iconoclasts whose superpower may derive from her refusal to traffic in the familiar, and who, by sheer bravery, manages to keep us on our toes even now, after all this time.
Novels about the writing of novels carry some risk. They can be self-regarding, they can be bewildering, and they can be slyly exacting, forcing the reader to retrace their steps in pursuit of objectivity while gleefully manipulating the only truth: that is, that this is all made up. Kemp – who was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writers’ award in 2020 for her debut, Nightingale – deftly avoids the first two of these pitfalls while triumphantly embracing the last.
“Does it ever end?” asks one character, as yet another man hurts yet another woman. But this isn’t an issue-led book: it’s women-driven. In counterpoint to suffering and survival is the bright, bold story of the bonds of friendship between these women, of a passing on of kindness, and of memory.
Chinatown shows us something we still need to learn to see about the American century. What has become legible in Chinatown is the figure of the pipeline. This is obvious in the case of the water pipeline or aqueduct at the center of Chinatown’s historical plot, to which so much critical attention has already been paid, but it is also true, if less obviously so, for the case of the oil pipelines at the periphery of Chinatown’s production. If, to Robert Evans in 1973, “something real” meant California’s water wars, in 2024 we might now also understand global oil wars.
Over the course of its long existence, it has shaped literary tastes without any real commitment to appraisal or critique, and it has taken pride in its ability to carry on a tradition of nothingness, no real engagement with books, only an often smarmy, worshipful reverence for (certain) books and (certain) writers.
In the end, truth machines haven’t progressed much from Llull’s Ars Magna. The 13th-century zealot hoped to automate truth to dispel people’s uncertainty—instead we’ve automated the uncertainty. Perhaps the elusive truth about the universe does lie in the baroque, feverish ramblings of Llull’s Ars Magna, if only somebody could decipher it. Just don’t ask ChatGPT.
For almost ten years now, my family and I have taken our annual vacation to a beach. As a Californian in land-locked Colorado, I often feel the call of the ocean—and it means my fifth- and sixth-grade kids can snorkel all day without coming up for air. These vacations aren’t just a quick detour from mountain living; they’re a mental reset that, almost without fail, reinvigorate my writing and motivation. Plus last year’s trip—to Maui, just before the fires—was the first time my kids were old enough to not require hyper-vigilance on the beach, which yielded another vacation bonus—relaxation. This year, our annual trip would assume even more significance: it would be a break from the appointments, the bills, and insurance hassles; a chance to catch my breath before this seemingly impossible thing happened.
Perhaps my favorite thing about writing here is that it’s too far from the house for the internet. After that, it’s the quiet. So quiet that, in the summer, I can identify most of the birdcalls in the surrounding trees. A trapped housefly, flinging itself into the windows from one side of the room to the other, is such an ear-splitting disruption that I stop writing until it makes its way to the opened door. I run outside to chase squirrels off the roof because of their rasping footsteps. A woodpecker searching for bugs in the shingles prompts a coffee break back up at the house. In fact, the boundary between the animal and human space is, well, relaxed around here. I keep the spiders around because I appreciate the work they do on the houseflies. I quite like watching a line of ants on the wall, am wondrously shocked that they all know where they’re going. Every spring I find at least one old tool drawer filled with acorns from a cheeky squirrel, and it always makes me smile.
If you’ve never read a Kate Quinn novel, there’s no time like the present. Or like the 1950s in Washington, D.C. That’s the setting for Quinn’s “The Briar Club,” which is a murder mystery wrapped up in the stories of multiple women who rent rooms at a boarding house during the height of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare.
At times, you feel the author’s considerable ingenuity straining as she comes up with one more way to look at lichen. They allow us to re-see our relationships with one another, to capitalism, to sentience, to language, to racism and crime and just about any other issue that might present itself. And yet as far-fetched as some of the analogies might initially seem, Palmer always finds a way to turn the lichen’s scale and stasis into an opportunity for genuine reflection: “Freedom and independence are associated with movement — the ability to get away, to leave and return, to explore and exploit. If you are attached, if you stay in place, you risk becoming an object and possibly an object to be used.”
First, a disclaimer to any self-important readers expecting a fiery takedown of the celebrity book club format: as someone who wants to see more books in the hands of readers, I am wholeheartedly in support of famous people using their immense influence and privilege to promote books instead of the many other products they could be paid handsomely to endorse. An article built on cynicism for something so overwhelmingly positive would be disingenuous click-bait, and you will not find that here.
But just because these book clubs are a net positive doesn’t mean they’re above investigation or critique. Ever since their rise in the late 2010s, the biggest celebrity book clubs have held immense influence over which books land on the bestsellers lists, and their future has an outsized impact on the commercial publishing industry. In order to better understand how these groups operate, I spoke to the teams behind the scenes, as well as with other publishing industry insiders.
Perhaps this is why in both science and in writing, there is no such thing as useless knowledge. Knowledge gained simply as a function of curiosity seems to have an inherent funky viewing angle. Scientists-in-training are often encouraged to attend seminars in other departments, because maybe a molecular biologist at a mechanical engineering talk will pick up an odd snippet of information or a way of thinking that sparks a new idea. Writers of fiction, too, cannot predict when learning some very specific, random fact might come in handy in a story—the oily flammability of birch bark, the difference between contact calls and alarm calls of songbirds, the behavior of tin buttons in cold temperatures, the vagaries of usefulness.
The Material, Bordas’s second novel to be written in English (the first two were in her native French), slams together this constantly revolving cast of characters for 18 continuous, frantic December hours. Moving from edgy faculty meeting to eviscerating workshop to “active shooter on campus” lockdown (it turns out to be a prank call) to, finally, a comedy battle against a rival Chicago improv group, almost every interaction along the way is examined for its potential as “material”.
What Pooley does best is create a club full of likable, fun-loving characters — Truth or Dare Jenga, anyone? — who are easy to root for. Just the kind of club many readers would be happy to join.
A starry night evokes magic, a sense of wonder or romance. But what about a starry sea? There are almost 2,000 species of sea stars or “starfish” worldwide, found across a range of habitats from tide pools to thousands of meters underwater. About a decade ago, the still-mysterious sea star wasting disease (SSW) had devastating impacts on sea star populations along the West Coast of North America. One of the hardest hit was the sunflower star, known as the cheetah of the intertidal zone for its speed and hunting prowess.
Ten years ago, the sunflower sea star population collapsed.
This was the scene in the aftermath of a supervolcanic eruption in Idaho, approximately 1,600 kilometers (900 miles) away. It was an eruption so powerful that it obliterated the volcano itself, leaving a crater 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide and spewing clouds of ash that the wind carried over long distances, killing almost everything that inhaled it. This was particularly true here, in this location in Nebraska, where animals large and small succumbed to the eruption’s deadly emissions.
Eventually, all traces of this horrific event were buried; life continued, evolved, and changed. That's why, millions of years later in the summer of 1971, Michael Voorhies was able to enjoy another delightful day of exploring.
From Thailand with chilies to Belgium with chocolate, many modern nations have embraced once-foreign ingredients, folding them into their culinary identity until their absence becomes unthinkable. The curious history of cilantro in Italy shows that the reverse is also true. Sometimes, an ingredient becomes so unpopular that we forget it’s been there all along.
When I tell you that poet Ella Frears’s new “novelistic text” takes the form of one long email to a landlord, you might balk. You shouldn’t: Goodlord is a dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny. Despite not having much of a plot – a young woman complains to her estate agent about the degradations of the housing market and what it means to be a young woman – Goodlord zips along, blackly compelling and readable.
Most of us on the Italian true-crime beat have always assumed that the most compelling Italian crime story linked to London was the murder of Roberto Calvi, found under Blackfriars’ Bridge in 1982. But Skotte tells the Markov story so crisply that this other bridge killing, in 1978, seems even more poignant: somehow more international, evocative and satisfyingly odd.
The search for a northern sea passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is legendary. Numerous expeditions from both sides of the continent ended in failure, some in disastrous frozen-in-ice situations. David Nicandri, a respected historian based in Washington state and the author of several books, including “Captain Cook Rediscovered,” now has taken on an exhaustive examination of the explorers and schemers who sought or promoted a link between oceans, along with the global competitions that influenced the search.
How do you follow a novel like Fleishman Is in Trouble? If Taffy Brodesser-Akner knew what people loved so much about her debut she would have replicated it, she says. The story of a newly divorced hepatologist discovering the joys of dating apps while trying to look after his two kids when his ex-wife goes missing on a yoga retreat, Fleishman Is in Trouble was one of the smartest, funniest novels of recent years. It was made into a hit TV series with a starry cast, for which Brodesser-Akner wrote the screenplay. But writing her second novel almost drove her “insane”. Long Island Compromise might be described as a Jewish take on The Corrections (Brodesser-Akner has read Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel four times); a whopping family saga about money and the American Dream, following three generations of the Fletcher family as they find, and then lose, their fortune. A TV version is already under way. “Writing for me is not generally hard,” Brodesser-Akner admits, “and every sentence in this book was a hard one.”
From the Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul), panpsychism is the view, held by many peoples around the world since antiquity, that consciousness resides in everything at least to some degree — that it’s a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical universe. Animals have it, plants have it, and even single cells have it. That doesn’t mean your chair is conscious — but, according to some panpsychists, the atoms inside it might be. How exactly that could work is a philosophical puzzle (more on that soon).
As you can imagine, scientists have spent the past century mocking this idea. Fair enough — it does sound wacky at first. And yet, this theory of consciousness, though still controversial, is now enjoying a resurgence as mounting scientific evidence suggests that you don’t need a complex brain to feel, remember, learn, or think. In fact, you may not need a brain at all.
Not long ago, on a Times podcast, Paul Krugman breezily announced (and if we can’t trust Paul Krugman in a breezy mood, whom can we trust?) that, though it’s hard to summarize the economic consequences of the pandemic with certainty, one sure thing is that it killed off ties. He meant not the strong social ties beloved of psychologists, nor the weak ties beloved of sociologists, nor even the railroad ties that once unified a nation. No, he meant, simply, neckties—the long, colored bands of fabric that men once tied around their collars before going to work or out to dinner or, really, to any kind of semi-formal occasion. Zoom meetings and remote work had sealed their fate, and Krugman gave no assurance that they would ever come back.
“Long Island Compromise” is an exploration of intergenerational trauma and an unabashed critique of income inequality — Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” is even invoked — but it is also uproariously funny.
They were welcoming, but even so: I was culturally shocked. My classes were in French, my home life was in French, I was navigating new friendships. Everything was different, and in those first few months, I felt lonely and overwhelmed. To quiet my mind, I turned to exercise. I started with running—through the cobbled streets of Rennes and the elegant parks, lined with historic buildings.
One day, I was running through the central plaza and needed to stop and stretch. I paused before a particularly ornate building that had caught my eye a few times before, yet inspired only idle curiosity—I’d assumed it was one of the city’s many opaque government edifices. That day, breathing heavily from my run, I looked more closely and realized that the structure was actually something much more accessible: a public swimming pool. It was like unexpectedly seeing an old friend in an unfamiliar place; I had to embrace it. The moment I stepped through the lobby, the comforting smell of chlorine enveloped me. Homesickness, vanquished.
Wolhuter is clever, predicting where readers’ minds will travel and cutting them off at the pass. Don’t look over there, she seems to say: focus. Some readers will find it challenging to pay such close attention in 2024 – but it’s thrilling, too, to be masterfully manipulated. The book is one thing and then it’s another, pushing the boundaries of narrative reliability, of plot, even of genre – but it’s managed so deftly there’s never a doubt that Wolhuter will pull it off in the end.
Ultimately, Daughter of the Merciful Deep is a novel about hope: a dream of a better world, a place where everyone can belong and be respected. While that dream may often seem out of reach—and there may be less magic in the real world to make it feel like a possibility—the idea that the future could hold something better than what has come before is a beautiful one.
Is writing in the writing itself, or in the sharing, and discussion, of that writing? Different versions of this question arise while reading this collection of 30 texts, written (whatever that means) between 2006 and 2023. It includes introductions to other people’s books, reviews, commissioned essays for art catalogues and interviews with other writers.
Joy in seeing that something outside of the narrative structure we’re familiar with is at play; joy in discovering a different sense of vastness and fluidity. Joy in waiting, patiently, with rich anticipation, for the seemingly disparate pieces of a narrative to mesh, to become something huge and beautiful. Joy in realizing, several chapters into a book, that you could not possibly say what it was “about” until reading to the end, and maybe not even then.
Chef Nathanial Zimet insists on using boquerones in the grilled Caesar salads at his New Orleans restaurant Boucherie. The marinated white Spanish anchovies, he says, are far superior to the salt-cured kind. Romaine spears, he adds, are immune to wilting over flame.
“It’s almost like it locks in the crunch of it,” he says, as the vivid green leaves curl and darken during a quick sear. He arranges the lettuce on a plate, drizzles it with dressing (lemon, garlic, Worcestershire and Tabasco) then generously scatters chunky basil croutons and craggy Parmesan shavings on top.
Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.
Everything about the way this book is written gives the reader a sense of the closeness in proximity in which all the characters exist, and squeezes you into the space to become another passenger on this dangerous and mysterious journey.
New York now, lead me back to New York then. There isn’t one New York, it’s too mediated and historicized and romanticized— a city haunted by images and stories of itself. In New York stories, one theme is retold like a chorus: people don’t work here, they hustle. Hustling plays into the urban dream for everyone, but for artists, hustling is celebrated as a mark of a visionary experience, a rite of passage.
But dreams are stubborn things, and within two years of the stroke, the thought of camping down a river to the sea reared its head above the water’s surface of my injured brain again. To surrender this dream to the stroke, as a completely sane person probably would have, was something I simply wasn’t willing to do. Not pursuing the dream might prolong my life, but would life without audacious goals really feel like living?
How did this fruit for privileged picnickers turn into the multimillion-pound industry that, in today’s summer months, outsells supermarket basics such as bread and milk? The story begins with romantic happenstance. Sweet, fragile Fragaria chiloensis found itself alongside the tougher Fragaria virginiana in the nursery of a French botanist. The hybrid offspring was juicy yet hardy, with a delicate hint of pineapple that earned it the name Fragaria ananassa. We don’t trouble ourselves with the names of strawberry species today because everything we buy comes from this “garden strawberry”.
What ultimately distinguishes the novel is its searching quality, a greater open-endedness than his two preceding works, whose moral universe was more clearly defined. It requires a reader to think rather than to offer a sage nod of agreement. Blue Ruin isn’t strictly autobiographical, but it’s clear that whether Kunzru is writing about the degradations of the art market, white profit from Black pain, or the conservative romanticism that runs through mass culture like sewage, he, like his protagonists, is aiming to create works of literature that do more than satisfy a contemporary publishing niche. In other words, there’s something distinctly meta about Jay’s resistance to the institutionalization of his art.
Seeing her husband in agony, Allison asked him if he wanted to stop. He said no. It broke Allison’s heart to see him suffer, and she worried that the experiment would set Todd back mentally and physically. He covered maybe a few hundred feet before he had to stop.
Still, the brief jog was a victory. Todd felt great. To his mind, he’d struck a blow against the misery that had plagued him for months. When he recalled the experience more than eight years later, the emotion of that day flooded back. He choked back sobs as he described it, slipping at times into the present tense as if he were still standing on that stretch of pavement. “I finally got out on the street,” he said. “This is going to be the start of something that I can do. Regardless of how hard it was and how painful it was, it gave me some hope.”
It’s rare but it does happen: a debut novel comes along that’s so obviously impressive, so advanced in the reach of its ideas and the gracefulness of its execution, that you want to start proselytising for it before you’ve even turned the final page. With its dissident intelligence and its comprehensive vision of a devastated social sphere, Mariel Franklin’s Bonding is the work of an author whose importance already feels assured.
Zoning in on a milieu of tech and pharmaceutical workers in 2020s London, Bonding depicts western society as a juggernaut zombie, digitally reconfigured and bereft of a coherent system of values, that staggers onwards in flight from an all-pervading truth: “no one had any idea how to live”.
James Womack’s latest collection sees the city as both muse and antagonist. A frustrated energy merges with sentiment in poems that feel like a last hurrah to living as we know it. “The city is dead, and yes, the country too, / and probably, beyond, the grey wide world,” he declares in Seasons. Womack, the author of three previous books of poetry, wrote this collection in the shadow of climate crisis and the pandemic, which is why it oozes with anguish. But there’s a quietness, too — a sense of acceptance so the poems never blare.
Full of microaggressions, cultural touchpoints and self-reflection, “Hey, Zoey” uses AI sentience to consider the issue of women’s autonomy from a new angle.
The high caliber of vernacular fiction astounds and delights, from Irish masters such as Kevin Barry and Paul Murray, to Scottish virtuosos like Ali Smith and Douglas Stuart. Now comes a prodigious debut novelist, Scott Preston. His “The Borrowed Hills,” set in rural Cumbria, tucked along England’s northwestern shoulder, is a marvel. Preston’s sinewy, supple prose showcases a cast of desperate sheep farmers as they grapple with the elements and their own clandestine urges.
Structured with the elegance of a three-act play (a small nod to Fennessy’s career as a playwright), the novel sees Weetman invite her readers into the deeply personal journey of her grief, marked with intimate reflections and heartfelt revelations. She confronts her own pain and loneliness with beautifully generous honesty, composure and curiosity.
That comes to two and a half books. Add to them a handful of lectures, essays, and sketches, most written or resurrected in the flurry of sudden, late-in-life fame, and you have Maclean’s entire literary output. You could read it all in a single day, yet it contains almost everything there is to know about what the English language can do. Are you trying to deploy a fact in a non-boring way? Consider this, on the geology of the Blackfoot River Valley: “The boulders on the flat were shaped by the last ice age only eighteen or twenty thousand years ago, but the red and green precambrian rocks beside the blue water were almost from the basement of the world and time.” Are you trying to find a new way to describe an old familiar thing? Consider this, on afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains: “By three-thirty or four, the lightning would be flexing itself on the distant ridges like a fancy prizefighter, skipping sideways, ducking, showing off but not hitting anything.” Are you trying to find a beginning for a story? Consider this, the opening line of “Young Men and Fire”: “In 1949 the Smokejumpers were not far from their origins as parachute jumpers turned stunt performers dropping from the wings of planes at county fairs just for the hell of it plus a few dollars, less hospital expenses.” That is a fly fisherman’s prose, spinning in glittering circles overhead before landing exactly where it must, for a story that is running headlong toward mortal danger.
An avid reader, Bonner likes to annotate books with different colored pens and highlighters. While watching Barbie, she remembers thinking to herself, “This is something I could annotate quite a lot in.”
A few months later, she got her wish. In December, Faber & Faber published the Barbie screenplay as a 138-page paperback, with full-color photos and a new introduction by the film’s co-writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. “I went round to all the bookshops and just happened to find it,” Bonner recalls. Meanwhile, in a real-life literary Barbenheimer, her father bought the Oppenheimer screenplay — also via Faber & Faber, which has published most of Christopher Nolan’s screenplays since 2001’s Memento. “He’s very much a history person, and he likes to read a lot,” Bonner says of her dad.
The first thing I needed to do was establish a baseline awareness of the difference between waking and dreaming using a technique called “critical state testing.” This is how it works: Several times a day, ask yourself if what you are experiencing is a dream. To make sure you’re awake, count your fingers. Plug your nose. Look at your watch, then look again to see if the numbers have moved.
If you do this often enough, the habit will spill over into your dreams. And when it does, you’ll find that your fingers are jelly. That you can breathe with your nose plugged. That your watch is unreadable. “dream standard time,” the psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge called it in his 1990 manual, “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”:asleep and awake at once.
Pichaya “Pam” Soontornyanakij—better known as Chef Pam, the Michelin-starred chef at the helm of Bangkok’s Potong restaurant—is descended from a family that moved to Thailand from southern China in the 1880s, five generations ago. Although her roots can be traced back to Fujian Province, Soontornyanakij grew up in a family that had long since assimilated into Thai culture—or so she thought.
“Growing up, my mom cooked pad thai regularly—maybe once a month,” says Pam. “I thought it was Thai.” It wasn’t until she started studying food and went to culinary school that she realized most of the food she had eaten in her family home was in fact Thai Chinese.
The Olympics’ signal event, the marathon, was conceived to honor the classical heritage of Greece and underscore the connection between the ancient and modern. But from the start, the 1904 marathon was less showstopper than sideshow, an absurdist spectacle that seemed more in keeping with the carnival atmosphere of the fair than the reverential mood of the games. After seeing how the event played out, officials nearly abolished it for good.
This is not fiction that is efficient and controlled, containing only what’s necessary. It’s too much at times – do we need a diversion every time a new character appears? – but sometimes too much is just right.
I bet parents will relate to the nostalgia of “Sandwich,” which skirts up against sentiment without ever crossing the line because, like Thornton Wilder in the play “Our Town,” Newman is adept at capturing the everyday details of life that seem insignificant at the time but turn out to have shaped us.
Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 occupies a very particular niche in literature, one that can be best described as the Parisian diorama: offering both intimate and panoramic views of the city and inhabitants through its daily happenings, this moveable feast adapts to whatever form or story it finds itself in but is immediately recognisable on its appearance, no matter how brief.
It is hard to convey to people outside Germany the extraordinary role Jürgen Habermas has played in the country. To be sure, his name inevitably appears on the more or less silly lists of world’s most influential philosophers. But there are no other instances of a public intellectual having been important in every major debate—in fact, often having started such debates—over six decades.
A new book by Berlin-based cultural historian Philipp Felsch, translated from German simply as The Philosopher with the clever subtitle Habermas and Us, argues that Habermas has always been perfectly in sync with different eras of postwar German political culture. This is a remarkable achievement for someone of his longevity: Habermas turns 95 this year.